Android App Video Review: Tiny Tower

Tiny Tower is a new free-to-play management and expansion game from developer Mobage. It’s in the same vein as FarmVille, asking you to manage resources to grow and expand infinitely for the sake of growth and expansion. I find this game much more enjoyable than FarmVille emulations though, and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys such games.

You start with a simple lobby and some cash. You are now asked to build another floor, which will house your first Bitizens, as they’re called. You continue earning money and adding new floors with a wide variety of goods and services, from restaurants to retail stores, creative outlets, and more. After employing some bitizens, each store will sell various products and bring in more money, and the whole thing starts again. Each store can employ up to three bitizens as well as sell three different products.

As you wait for goods to be restocked and floors to be constructed, you’ll manage the many visitors who come to your tower by way of the elevator, binging bitizens to their requested floors like the extinct Elevator Man. Occasionally a VIP will visit, such as a celebrity or construction foreman, and they’ll bring various bonuses, such as loads of extra customers or reduced construction time. You’ll occasionally be tipped for your services with Towerbux, a special currency that lets you override timers, speeding up construction and restocking. It also lets you purchase various odd objects, like faster elevators and paint buckets. Any floor can be randomly repainted with a new color scheme, and any bitizen can have his or her clothing and hair randomly changed as well.

The game has an excellent pixelated art style, and the music is quite relaxing as well. It’s not really meant to be played in extended sessions so much as it’s meant to be checked in on several times a day for a couple minutes at a time. This is by far my favorite game in this genre. It may not be your cup of tea, but if it is, definitely give it a look. It’s probably the most original take I’ve seen, and of course, you can play it online and compare your tower with your friend’s towers. It didn’t win iTunes’ iPhone game of the year award for nothing. There are various features on the iOS version that are absent from the Android version, but they will surely be patched in sooner than later, and this game will get even better.